NigerGate: The Italian Connection

Josh Marshall has the first in a series of articles looking at the Italian Connection to NigerGate. Josh is also asking for any reporters' questioning Bush on this subject. Bush and Berlusconi have cancelled Press Conferences and only issued bland statements after their talks today, but this later response from Berlusconi to an Italian reporter indicates that he and Bush did at least discuss the Niger forgeries:

"E' una bufala totale, una notizia totalmente infondata": cosi' il presidente del Consiglio, Silvio Berlusconi, ha commentato oggi l'inchiesta di un quotidiano italiano sul cosiddetto "Nigergate". Al termine dell'incontro con il presidente americano George Bush, Berlusconi ha sottolineato: "Lo stesso Bush mi ha confermato che gli USA non hanno avuto alcuna informazione dai servizi italiani".

Translation:

"It's a complete BUFALA [sorry, don't know that word, sounds like slang - "Crock" maybe?], a totally unfounded story": that is how the president of the Consiglio, Silvio Berlusconi, responded today to the question today from an Italian journalist about the so-called "NigerGate" scandal. Following a meeting with the US president George Bush, Berlusconi emphasized: "Bush himself confirmed to me that the USA did not have any information from Italian agencies."

And yet, as Marshall's analysis and other reports make clear:

Soon after the September 11th attacks, the Italian military intelligence agency SISMI sent its first report to the US government including details of an alleged Iraqi purchase of 500 tons of lightly-processed uranium ore from Niger.

Details of this and a subsequent SISMI report formed the basis of a reference to alleged Iraq-Niger uranium sales which was included in a CIA briefing Vice President Cheney received in early 2002. It was that briefing that prompted Cheney's request for more information on the Iraq-Niger sale. And that request led, in turn, to the CIA's decision to dispatch Joe Wilson on his trip to Niger. The Italian reports had set the whole process in motion...

Or what about this:

... the State-CIA IG report briefly noted a murky story about contacts between SISMI and the CIA in the summer of 2002. That summer SISMI had approached the CIA about an operation they intended to run against the Station Chief of Iraqi intelligence in Rome. The plan was to send disinformation about the Iraqi Station Chief back to Baghdad via a third country. And the subject of the disinformation was to be trade between Iraq and Niger.

So Bush is lying, or Berlusconi is lying, or Bush is just an incompetent, uninformed buffoon.